Monday, March 10th, 2008

Last.fm similar track playlists in iTunes

I’ve just come up with an idea to continue the trend of writing software to extend last.fm’s web services. This program is just a little example so you can see the direction I’m heading. The program takes some selected tracks and will automatically create an itunes playlist of similar tracks (according to last.fm) that it finds in your library. It also spits out an approximate accuracy (just for curiosity’s sake). Give it a try, and if you like the idea, leave a comment and I’ll probably put more work into it. Maybe I’ll even compile it to work with some of my other programs.

This isn’t a real release, so take it with a grain of salt. Requires/will install .Net Framework 3.5.

[Download] (now it runs an installer to fix some dependency issues)

The possibilities for this program are endless really. Some ideas would be:

• Limit the playlist to contain only songs with a particular tag in the comments (would work well with itunes tagger)
• Create automatic playlists from itunes’ most played tracks
• Allow user to specify the approximate popularity of the track (ie only songs you listen to a lot, only songs you rarely hear, somewhere in between)
• Exclude certain ratings, skip counts, etc

There is also another program out there that will create playlists for you based on various last.fm data. It’s called Local.fm, available here.